Initial learnings from my non-traditional journey into design
Does a traditional journey even exit?
Today I work as a product designer at Xero, the largest global tech company in New Zealand. But as a 28-year-old digital product designer, I am not exactly a success story for a design career but I’ve been on a journey that has taught me to be intentional about my work and here is a bit of that story.
In May of 2016, I graduated with a Computer Science degree from an institute that is very hard to get into and much harder to get through. At some point in time in those four years of training as an engineer, I realised I wasn’t cut out for it–but nor was it for me.
My interest and curiosity for problem-solving drew me towards a CS undergrad programme. But it wasn’t all that I had expected from it. We would spend hours perfecting our answers to questions that had been solved long past. While this might have been an essential aspect of learning in that school, it was the reason I looked beyond it to find purposeful work.
Finding design
In my third year, I discovered web development through a database management paper. A tiny part of it involved creating an interface to use all the complexities that lay underneath. The part that genuinely fascinated me was building the interface because that was the part that people would be looking at and interacting with. I’d spend more time learning CSS than SQL. I didn’t do exceptionally well on that paper, but I did bag an internship as a full stack web developer as a result.
In May of 2015, I went into my first day as an intern at Aegis (now Startek). The team I got added to worked on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technologies and was given a project that would span the entirety of my 3-month stint.For the most part, I was left alone to my own devices with the odd check-in. My project was to create a tool used by staff to track their project (think JIRA but much simpler).
Since my interest in learning web design stemmed from my desire to make the things that people would interact with, I had questions for those who’d be using the tool as I started building it. It was not the norm around there to ask people what they expected from something they would be using, and I’d often be met with surprise or, rarely even, dismissed for the nonsensical trivialness of my ask.
The why’s of learning
My supervisor was supportive and helped me get a few people to help me make this tool valuable. I’d get their input from colour choices, placement of elements to even interaction. I wasn’t “designing” back then… I was trying to make something that would fill a need. The only ammunition I had was my curiosity and a strong urge to ask “why” for every little thing.
I finished my project a couple of weeks earlier and thought to take the tool for a test run before submission. I went to my friendly group of users and asked them to use the tool. To my relief, they liked it; after all, I built to their needs and goals. I was thrilled. I asked them to use it until my penultimate day and give me some testimonials that I could use.
What happened next was a bit of a surprise because no feedback ever came. As good as it may have been, the tool had no place in the larger context of staff’s workflow, and it never got used in everyday life to garner any feedback. Alas, I was disappointed that my three months of work resulted in an incorrect solution for their work context.
To create impactful solutions, you need to dig deep. You need to deeply empathise with the audience you’re building for and understand their actual needs. You have to keep biases in check and be critical of your ideas.
You don’t need a “UX designer” in your title to build elegant solutions. You need curiosity to understand your audience, perspective to see the larger context, and perhaps a tad bit of humility to see the shortcomings in your ideas–there will be some!
After all, you are not the user.
You can follow me on Twitter, where I share my journey into design and other experiences.
